Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  ‘But was he cute?’ I ask.

  ‘Cute? Sure, he was cute,’ says Gloria. ‘I’d put him in my pocket, I guess.’

  The man with the plane was pleasant enough, but had made his fortune in the tattoo parlour business and was literally covered from head to toe in tattoos. Gloria knows what she wants now and has learned to extract truth from hyperbole. If a man talks about being ‘equal partners’ it means he’s broke, and Gloria’s had enough of that. She has developed a theory about sex too, which expands on the ‘equal partners’ theory. Women are at their prime at forty (roughly her age), while by the same age men are long past it. But this is not bad news after all: their lack of vigour forces them to be skilful and attentive, which is what she wants, so she asks, ‘In bed, do you like to be equal partners, give pleasure, or receive it?’

  Only the givers get.

  I watch her talking to another man in Atlanta. He’s in his forties but has never married. A Christian, he’s looking for a wholesome woman with whom to settle down, maybe have a family. He sends a photograph. He is a clean-cut, handsome guy with a moustache. Over forty, never married, lives in Atlanta, and a moustache? To me, it’s as clear as vodka: the guy’s a guilt-ridden Christian fruit looking to jump ship. I share my thoughts with Gloria, who doesn’t see it that way at all and gets a little miffed at my pessimistic view. To her, the guy looks like a red-blooded all-American, a pilot maybe.

  I’ve cruised around on AOL. It’s fascinating. Particularly the sexual side. You are admitted to a spruce suburban home and instantly find a dungeon in the basement. Take the American male, for example. You walk around in the world above ground and he’s a cheery hetero man in a baseball hat chomping on a hot dog and talking endlessly about football statistics; he takes his family to church on Sunday and heartily slaps the backs of his fellow businessmen on Monday, but when you encounter him in the anonymity of the AOL chat room, he’s a BiMM (bi married man). He’s ‘Wearing Hers’ and ‘Ready2Meat.’ Your more ambivalent MM is ‘Lking4Shemale’ or wants to see his ‘Wifewithothermen.’ The moustached ‘BiCop’ is having fun with ‘SubM4Dom,’ after which he’ll practice his headlock on ‘MM4MWrestling.’ As for ‘VeryHairyBiMM,’ well, he has a shot with ‘BigBellyBi,’ and everyone has a shot at ‘Mth4U.’

  I just got this off AOL. It’s not yet ten on a weekday morning and that’s not the half of it. There are guys who crave enemas from ‘nurses’ in thick black stockings and others who beg BBWs (big beautiful women) to sit on their faces until they faint from lack of oxygen.

  Somewhat less graphic as a general rule, the women seek love and romance … or not. A lot of them are looking to get tied up like a package from Guatemala and get whacked into submission by a sadistic DOM. Some like to dress up as ponies and canter around for their masters naked but for saddle, bridle, stirrups, and a butt-plug tail made of genuine horsehair. A large number of them are extremely interested in each other—and who can blame them once you’ve seen what the guys are up to?

  Then there’s the photos. You can get anything you like, from straight Playboy cheesecake to shots of women being screwed by mules. You can get pictures of females so hirsute they look like monkeys or gynaecological close-ups of hermaphrodite genitalia. There are ‘peek’ shots, blurry snaps through holes and vents, or interracial sex, or Shemales with floppy dicks and hard eyes. There are vast breasts, flat chests, ‘puffy nipples,’ and snatches stuffed with zucchini or trout or the more conventional vibrator.

  But most amazing of all? ‘Amateur.’ A post-shower Mrs. Foster by Mr. Foster, or the Sherrils and the Jankovitches having sex on the living-room couch. And you see the faces! There she is, smiling at you over her shoulder from the plaid divan, ‘Hey, look at this, two dicks up my ass!’ and there he is, off to one side in his favourite chair, studying the situation, ‘Gee, two dicks up my wife’s ass. How about that?’ And these are not the faces of degenerate, drug-addicted sex-workers, these are the faces of your local bank manager and his wife. I disapprove of nothing—in fact a lot of it looks like fun—but how can they be so trusting? How can they reveal themselves like this? You look at the faces and you just absolutely know if they can take time off from ingesting dicks, they’re going to vote Republican.

  How can such flamboyant hedonism co-exist with such oppressive Puritanism? Or maybe the question is, How can it not? In England, isn’t it always the conservative minister who, having just given a speech on traditional family values, goes home, dresses in a corset and a pair of stockings, and accidentally asphyxiates himself while hanging by his neck from a pulley? Nature seeks balance, I suppose: thwart the most primal instinct, the one without which none of the others can exist, and inevitably when it demands release, it bursts forth deformed and seeks the most extreme sin it can conceive of. In other words, every time Jerry Falwell or the Pope opens his mouth to preach, another pervert is created.

  ‘Family Values.’

  Boom! Mr. Jones asks his wife to do it with the family dog and Mrs. Towne gets fist-fucked by the FedEx man while hubby masturbates inside the closet. As Nietzsche put it, ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated—into vice.’

  Saturday is a beautiful day, sharp and bright, not even humid, and Gloria and I drive out to Mom’s Diner, ‘The Cleanest Restaurant in Town,’ which lies up the hill. Gloria has slept well and is in a good mood. She shows me the new newspaper in town, the Mountain Morning News, a right-wing anti-government paper which objects to zoning and so on. It has the usual resentful, whining tone of such rags, thwarted self-interest masquerading as conviction. I like the Herald-News better, it’s an honest paper which tells you about the town.

  Stuffed with egg, biscuit, gravy, and grease, we return to the Magnolia House and Gloria starts to pack cheerfully. Fifty pairs of shoes are thrust into large garbage bags which I take downstairs. Twelve pairs of Levis (‘I gotta get these pressed and starched’), six hats, and hundreds of assorted clothes are on the bed, waiting to be culled and suitcased. She’s wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, grey wool exercise shorts, and white sneakers. Thinking about tomorrow, she realises she has no shoes to wear with jeans. ‘I gotta have platforms for jeans,’ she tells me, so I go fetch the fifty pairs of shoes back up and a pair of platforms are extracted.

  A couple come to pick up something they bought from Gloria in last weekend’s yard sale. These are the people who will look after the Magnolia House until it’s sold. Gloria says the handyman never came to fix the roof, kept promising, never came.

  ‘Did you dawg-talk him?’ the man asks.

  ‘Sure,’ says Gloria, ‘but it don’t seem to have no effect.’

  After lunch, Gloria wants to go up to Lester and Ruth-Anne’s farm to say goodbye to her horses. Lester and Ruth-Anne are away for the weekend. The requisite goblet is filled with fluid and ice and carried out to the Explorer, a cigarette is lit, and the knee steers us up the hill. Gloria tells me of the joys of riding. ‘You take a ham sandwich, a diet Coke, some water, a piece of leather and a hole-punch and you just go, all day, ridin’ through the woods an’ hills.’

  We arrive up at the farm to be greeted by a one-eyed dog. It’s a modern ranch house, surrounded by rolling pasture stocked with grazing horses. I stay very close to Gloria as she enters one of these beast-infested fields. It’s terrifying. The horses, and there seem to be at least ten of them, are massive. Their heads are massive, their teeth are massive and their hooves are massive, and they have us surrounded. Gloria tramps confidently among them.

  ‘You gotta be careful not to treat them like pets,’ she says, reaching up and petting a huge, dribbling, log-like head, ‘or they’ll start to play with you.’ Play with me?! ‘See how they jump on each other? Well, they’ll start doin’ that to you, an’ that can hurt.’ As if I didn’t believe her, she shows me some scars.

  I suspect there’s something sexual in this ‘jumping on each other’ business and I can’t help wondering what would happen if inside one of these vast pre
historic heads the thought is forming, ‘I think I’d like to make that little fella down thar my wife.’ What would I do? Fight? Out of the question. Take it? Anatomically impossible.

  As Gloria locates her two horses and fondles their snouts in tearful farewell, I leg it to the fence, leap over, and lock myself in the car. The one-eyed dog lopes miserably around. Gloria returns, wiping her nose, and we drive home.

  An inexorable calm settles over the Magnolia House. As Gloria extracts her life from it, so she diminishes its power over her. The choice has been made and most of the work done; Gloria rests in a gap between her past and future, the one too poignant for reflection, the other too frightening to contemplate. I leave her upstairs in the den, wandering around picking at things, and go downstairs to type out some notes. When I return an hour later she’s prone on the couch, the dim light flickering down on her through the fan. The TV is on and she’s switching back and forth between two Westerns, in search of Brodie, the last decent man in her life.

  The light starts to die and now it’s time to go say goodbye to Aunt Ruth. We drive up the hill again on Route 30, which, I now find out, is in fact ‘The Trail of Tears.’ It seems appropriate.

  We drive past the farm and turn off onto a one-lane road. To one side is a Christian camp. A sign reads, ‘Pay at the office to ride the blob,’ and the blob can in fact be seen, a large brightly coloured rubber float tethered in a small lake. Above the camp’s entrance is a picture of an angry skull with a rifle. The man who runs the place describes himself as ‘A black belt for Jesus.’

  Aunt Ruth’s house is a low-slung California-style house with vertiginous views over the valleys of eastern Tennessee. Down below, the Tennessee River meanders among the hills, and in the distance there’s a nuclear plant crouched in haze. Aunt Ruth shuffles slowly to the door and lets us in.

  ‘I’ve prepared a soufflé, but it’s going to take another hour.’

  ‘I told you not to cook anything!’ says Gloria, an edge of panic in her voice.

  ‘I don’t have to do what you tell me,’ Aunt Ruth replies, keeping her head down and moving back toward the stove, where she’s stirring melted cheese.

  Gloria, unable to face a long goodbye, had indeed told her not to cook and now negotiates the old lady down to a sandwich. The bubbling cheese is abandoned as Aunt Ruth sets off toward the refrigerator. I sit and watch as they talk. For the first time, I feel I might really be performing a useful function, if only that of distraction. Gloria says Aunt Ruth’s birthday is coming up. She’s going to be ninety, but she doesn’t want a party. ‘What’s the point … all that fuss and bother,’ says Aunt Ruth. Gloria rolls her eyes and tells me in a loud voice that when Aunt Ruth’s husband died some time ago, the old lady had her own gravestone put up next to his, already engraved with her name and date of birth, leaving only the date of her demise to be filled in.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I ask in astonishment.

  ‘Well, I wanted it to age at the same rate as his,’ Aunt Ruth tells me. ‘I thought it would be neater that way.’

  I’m silenced for a moment and so are they. Eventually, I ask Aunt Ruth what Gloria was like as a kid and get a portrait of idyllic rural youth—days running free in the hills, ticks and jiggers the only danger, under-age driving with Ruth’s complicity, the red light Gloria ran, and the unbelievable coincidence of Uncle Wallace happening to be there, right there at the light, can you believe that, right there? But at the conclusion of each burst of memory lies silence, the drag of sorrow.

  As we eat our sandwiches, Gloria applies artificial respiration to the dying hour (‘Oh, you still have those great old TV dinner trays!’), but only artifice survives. Gloria wipes her lips and sets down her napkin. Aunt Ruth’s hands rise involuntarily to her mouth, first one, then the other clamped on top of it, and she stares at the Formica counter.

  ‘Well …’ says Gloria, standing.

  Aunt Ruth looks up at her.

  ‘We ain’t gonna say goodbye,’ she says, trembling, ‘we’re going to say, “See you along the road.” ’

  But they do say goodbye, Gloria tearfully, Aunt Ruth with resolutely muted sorrow. She must not cry, must be maternal even now when shrunk and Gloria, a woman, must be the adult or become the orphan. But the effort compels the hands back to her mouth again and her eyes glitter fearfully above their knotted veins. I turn away in shame at watching from outside.

  As we drive away, her frail figure hangs behind the screen door, ghostlike.

  This too is the consequence of failure and Gloria knows it, and later, as we drink heavily up in her crepuscular den, she curses her ex-husband for battering her Magnolia dreams, which will, officially and forever, die tomorrow.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Home Is Where the Heart Is

  As so often happens, the drama of Gloria’s departure from the Magnolia House is mercifully diminished by practical details. Garbage bags, the unplugging of TVs, packing the car. There are no tears. The last guest writes the last message in the guest book. ‘The Magnolia House is beautiful but not as beautiful as your spirit,’ or words to that effect.

  I help her settle the dogs in the back of the car and then give her a kiss on the cheek. She lights a cigarette, hoists the ubiquitous cup, and sets her knee for Pennsylvania.

  I drive out of town to Evansville, some five miles north of Dayton, where Darwins are rumoured to be buried. I find a graveyard on a hill above the high school. There is a plot of Darwins. I set my camera up and photograph myself sitting on one of the stones.

  I need to take a piss and walk to a distant edge of the cemetery overhung by trees. When I’ve finished, I notice some red beads hanging in the branches. I look down and see an old unmarked grave, more red beads, and a small modern sign which I’d almost urinated on. I pick it up and turn it over.

  It says, ‘Eleanor Darwin.’ Having not at this point concluded there’s almost certainly no connection between me and this bunch of Darwins, I intone the obligatory ‘Wow’ and walk away.

  I drive to the Chattanooga airport and eat a sandwich filled with moist barbecue pork, which is the best food I’ve had since the start of the trip. On the flight back to New York I’m sitting next to a gastroenterologist. He tells me how frustrating it is when patients expect you to know everything and be able to cure anything, because you know enough to know you don’t know much, while your competition, the New Age practitioners, who know almost nothing, happily give the impression they know everything, and as most diseases cure themselves and others are psychosomatic, often seem to succeed in a way scientific doctors don’t.

  ‘Your chakras are out of alignment.’

  ‘Gee, I feel better already.’

  Soon I’m in the back of a cab, rising up out of Astoria on the approach to the Triboro Bridge.

  Manhattan. The shock of the monumental city. It should be spelled Man!?hattan. You look at it and think: man did this? It seems more like a natural phenomenon, giant crystals thrust into the sky by a billion years of … thrusting. It’s beyond belief. I’ve only ever met one New Yorker who doesn’t, even after years, feel a surge of awe and affection at this sight and he used to be in charge of the bridges and tunnels and so maybe saw the sight too often and with collapse and dilapidation in mind.

  Next morning I walk to my office and everything is angular, sharp, clean and solid. The old buildings in Tennessee tend to have a rickety quality and the new are merely shoddy.

  I call my lawyer.

  ‘How was the trip?’ he asks.

  ‘Fine,’ I tell him, ‘but I’ve got bad news. We’re going to burn in hell.’

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ he says.

  I’ve got a month before I return for the re-enactment of the trial. I am absolutely sure now that the comedy of the re-enactment will be the centrepiece of the book, the event around which everything revolves and out of which I can shoot whatever digressions I want.

  I settle on the idea and explain it to my publisher, Tom Hedley, wh
o loves it. I am about to get to work on the book when my rewrite of the New York script is approved.

  When I write a script, I take no days off. I work seven days a week for as long as it takes. It’s a question of momentum. If I stop for a day my memory of what a character was feeling thirty pages back fades. I used to have a problem working, now I have a problem not working. I wake up at six to be at my office by seven. I work all day and when the night comes I stop for dinner and then go back to work; the characters are in me and I want to return to them. I took an acting class at the Strasberg Institute once and the Method was explained to me. I’ve always been sympathetic to actors, admired their nerve, indulged them. Now I saw why. I had been doing this for years, looking for techniques by which I could trick myself into a mood and hold myself inside it.

  But it’s hard. I can feel myself running out of money. I get up even earlier. Soon, I’m drinking so much coffee, my liver twitches. My drunk-driving problem is looming closer. What am I going to do? If I don’t have a licence, how am I going to get around when I go back to Tennessee?

  I hire a researcher to try and find out what happened to Rappleyea after the trial. She turns out to be a Christian Scientist and I get some tracts, but she also turns out to be pretty effective. We find out he had some legal problems and got sent to jail somewhere in the South.

  Sometimes I go out to dinner and talk about my trip; but as soon as I begin, the eyes lock on too fixedly. My friends pay attention, and then drift. It’s all so alien, so preposterous, dismissable, a cartoon, not so much America as Americana. When I tell them about the jail preacher or about Leland with his baptismal Jacuzzi, they laugh. They’ve seen it at the movies. When I tell them about Kurt Wise, they become irritated and wave their hands around in a brushing aside motion. What a fool, what a joke. Sometimes I find myself defending him, but it’s impossible. Defence rests in who he is, in a sideways glance, the quality of his laugh, and I’m not a good enough raconteur to conjure up the poignancy of the whole man; I cannot seduce my friends into the humanity behind the cliché.